Charles Jensen (1)

This slim little chapbook, winner of the 2006 Frank O’Hara Award, announces itself with striking cover art: a black-and-white photograph of a lifeless bird, one wing visibly withered, pinned against a wall as if in flight. Strictly speaking, these are elegiac poems; but I think of elegies as being in some way about the person being mourned, and in this chapbook, the deceased beloved is present only as body -- we don't get a strong sense of what he was like in life. From “Parlor”:

The undertaker asks, “Would you like to view the body?”
But I’ve seen you.

The air around the body is cold. You chill it.
My neck is cold. The blank coins of your eyes
have been removed.

He’s laced your fingers
incorrectly. You’re left-handed:
left thumb goes on top. A lover would know
these little details, like how

this isn’t the first time
you’ve worn lipstick.

Your hair remains immaculate.
You mannequin, you. In your new black suit.

You, mannequin, on your back.
No one’s going to love you like this—

In the absence of the beloved as character, the experience of mourning itself takes center stage and serves almost as a character, a personage. There is the necessity of dealing with the body of the deceased, the necessity of funeral and ritual, the necessity of coping with the day-to-day post-funeral mundanities (e.g. bills that continue to arrive), and there is the way mourning rings out into the world and, for a time, changes everything the mourner sees. These poems aren't about the dead, or even really about the memory of the dead. As the chapbook’s title -- and the last line of the last poem -- acknowledge, they're about the living: “You are dead. And I still have my living things to do.”

(Published in Galatea Resurrects 5)… (altro)